Applying Big Data to your Employee Engagement Strategy

Growing over the last several years, employee engagement is a big topic for businesses. Study after study shows the problems of a disengaged workforce—dwindling employee morale, and the hefty price businesses pay for productivity losses from such issues.

Employee Engagement: Is it Getting Any Better?

Unfortunately, employee engagement problems have a plateaued. However, if you look at Gallup reports—a pioneer in employee engagement surveys—the trend is not new. According to the research firm, less than one-third of U.S. workers are engaged in their jobs in 2014. This is the “highest reading since 2000.”

It’s pretty clear. No matter how much we talk about employee engagement, we’re still stuck in a rut. It’s time to re-think employee engagement. What better way to do it than by bringing big data into the equation?

Big data has already demonstrated its importance in solving a host of business problems. From increased customer intelligence and lead generation, to helping form and drive better business strategies, big data has a widespread impact on modern business.

How Can Big Data Help?

In terms of customer experience, big data equips businesses with a vast amount of customer information. Using records of customer interactions, buying histories, social media, online communities, and surveys, businesses can predict future actions faster and with greater accuracy than ever before.

Many businesses, however, forget that our number one customer is our workforce. Therefore, it’s our responsibility to create an environment that helps our employees flourish. Just like we strive to build healthy, happy, and long-term relationships with our customers, we need to empower and build trust with our employees. However, it isn’t something that develops organically. Trust can only be built over time. But it is worth the effort to begin thinking about your employee engagement efforts, since engaged, valued employees will bend over backwards to remain loyal.

When you have the right tools and analytics in place, you can measure everything right including individual performance, team spirit, interactions between departments, and the overall company culture.

Data-Driven Strategies to Engage the Workforce

In the pre-big data days, businesses had a tendency to sideline problems with intangible solutions. Culture management was one such issue. How do employees behave? Do they reflect company values in their actions? Is there a positive work culture? More than 80 percent of companies say they conduct employee satisfaction surveys, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, but “many admit that they don’t understand how to interpret the results nor what to do to improve survey scores.” How do we change this? A few ways would be to create teams that include people familiar with the work being performed; be sure and hire and/or train staff with exceptional analytical skills. Don’t be afraid to share your employee data with key partners and stakeholders—people who aren’t part of the process but who have a vested interest in the outcome and are willing to challenge the status quo.

Use data to know your employees better. Determining what inspires employees, what deters them, and what they don’t care about allows employers to motivate their teams to greater performance levels. With the huge reserves of HR data at their disposal, businesses can go beyond their gut-feelings, and make better decisions for their employees. They can gather the most relevant metrics on their workers to understand, analyze, and act. This ensures that their employee engagement strategy is effective.

Apply the right metrics. Pick a few simple metrics that’ll give you insights into areas of concern. Start by finding the answers for basic questions, like “do your employees feel proud to be a part of the organization?” “As an employer, do you give them enough incentives to stay motivated?” “Do you spend enough time to hear and resolve the grievances of your employees?”

Measure the right KPIs. Focus on the most important employee-based key performance indicators (KPIs) for your business. Applying big data analytics to monitor your employees’ performance helps you appreciate the top performers. It also opens up a whole new way to identify and support your underperforming and unsatisfied employees before things get worse. Big data’s predictive capabilities even let you know which employees are prone to accidents, health problems, or show early signs of dissatisfaction. This also stops negative employee behavior from growing. Data may be a lynchpin in understanding how to find and keep the best talent.

Data solutions that track employee engagement, satisfaction, and retention are key to the future of building and sustaining a happy and motivated workforce. The early adopters of data-drive employee engagement strategies are bound to find themselves ahead of their competitors.

Daniel Newman is the co-founder of V3*Broadsuite and is an experienced C-level executive, serving as a strategy consultant for small and mid-sized businesses. He’s also an insight/analyst partner to four Fortune 50 enterprises and previously served as the co-founder and CEO of EC3, a hosted IT and communications services provider. Prior to that, he served as the CEO of United Visual, Inc. in Chicago Illinois.

He is a widely published writer who contributes weekly to Forbes, Entrepreneur, Huffington Post and industry publications such as Commercial Integrator, Sound & Communication and Corporate Tech Decisions. He’s also author of three best-selling business books including The New Rules of Customer Engagement, The Millennial CEO, and just recently Evolve: Marketing (^as we know it) is Doomed.

Daniel has established a reputation as a leading thinker in topics such as Social, Big Data, Cloud and Mobile. He has been named to many top influencer lists in all of these areas, including recognition by the Huffington Post as one of the 100 business and leadership accounts to follow on Twitter. He is also an adjunct professor of management at North Central College.

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